Ticket prices are destroying the World Cup, NBA Finals, and Stanley Cup on resale market

I found myself outside a Walmart at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday, because sometimes being the father of a nine-year-old is like that. My daughter informed me the evening before, right as she was going to bed, that she had to have a plain white t-shirt they were going to decorate in class for the end of school — and naturally, I’m not organized enough to have checked the class email to have this prepared ahead of time. Instead of venturing out that evening I figured “I’ll go in the morning when nobody is there yet.”

Arriving just before six, there was a huddled mass of between 12 and 15 men, aged from their early-to-mid 20s. I figured it had to have something to do with sports cards, and I was right. This was a weekly ritual for the citizen dirtbags of my central North Carolina city, teeming outside the Walmart to buy up every card put on the shelves, not to open as collectors, but to turn around and flip them on Facebook marketplace for profit. I stood within enough of an earshot to hear them bragging about how much profit they made the week prior, then I heard something that absolutely floored me.

“I got all their Needohs last week,” a man exclaimed joyfully. “Just took them right off the stock cart. Dude working gave me shit, and I was like ‘touch grass, asshole.’ Flipped them all the same week for $40 each.”

For the uninitiated, Needohs are satisfying, squishy, sensory cubes that’s the fad among the under-10 set right now. You could walk into a Walmart or Target and get them for under $10 a few months ago, but there’s scarcity now — so adult vultures are tracking down the stock, buying them all, and flipping them online. At the time of writing every Needoh on Walmart.com is re-selling for 300-400% markup, capitalizing on the FOMO of children to line the pockets of the worst people around.

Cards and squishy cubes are one thing when it comes to social parasites, because at the end of the day it’s just stuff. Sure, it’s gross — but ultimately nobody needs these things, and so long as you can get away from the FOMO and social pressure of not possessing them, the whole process loses its power. What’s truly insidious is how resellers have gleefully and openly infiltrated the realm of sports, and how we’ve just accepted it to the point that we’ve normalized the expectation in 2026 is that you’re always going to have to pay a premium markup to see a team live. If you want to make memories, then you best give your pound of flesh to the scavengers.

Discussion around reselling and price gouging is making headlines this week in the lead up to the FIFA World Cup, the NBA Finals, and the NHL Stanley Cup Finals. Three marquee events, all suffering from the pains of parasitic resellers.

FIFA came under fire for instituting “dynamic pricing” for this year’s World Cup, which has resulted in exorbitant prices, ensuring only the most wealthy are going to games. In response to criticism, FIFA released a tranche of over 77,000 public tickets via their official website, only to see them disappear almost instantly. Newsweek is reporting that these tickets were bought out immediately and then placed on reseller websites.

The amount of excitement around the New York Knicks’ first NBA Finals appearance since 1999 is having a similar effect, with resellers purchasing every available seat over a month ago, banking on the possibility that the Knicks might make the Finals. Now that it has come to fruition, This isn’t simply a problem when it comes to global events like the World Cup, or big-market teams like the New York Knicks. Just this week both the Carolina Hurricanes and Ticketmaster had to release statements as fans in Raleigh grew furious that resellers had taken over the market for the Stanley Cup, where “Verified Resale Tickets” consumed the entire market, selling for over $1000 each for nosebleed seats that sell for between $40-60 during the regular season.

Every time this pops up both ticket platforms and teams share a similar refrain: There’s nothing we can do about it. Ticket price gouging has been normalized to the point where even those in charge of selling tickets accept that nothing can be done.

Something can be done, and it has been done in other countries — but not here. The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016 was signed into law in the twilight of the Obama administration with the purpose of trying to end online resellers of live events, but the scope of the bill was hysterically naive. Instead of making it illegal to price gouge, the bill only banned using software to bypass control measures like Captcha, or use exploits inside the back-end of a sellers’ websites. Sophisticated online buyers still use bot farms to harvest their tickets, but stop short of crossing the line of the BOTS act, ostensibly making their entire racket legal.

That has brought us into the hellscape we’re in now, where it’s impossible for anyone but the wealthiest to attend the games that mean the most, and it is a uniquely American problem. Only 16 states have anti-scalping laws that would protect consumers from price gouging, but the majority of these laws are out of date. They address issues like reselling tickets within the radius of an arena, or selling for above face value — but there’s nothing stopping someone from selling online from a state without scalping safeguards.

Meanwhile, ticket vendors themselves act like there’s nothing that can be done, but that’s because of the enormous money they are bringing in. In a perfect world they would simply block reselling tickets purchased on their platform, but they have a vested interest in seeing these tickets sold two or more times. With service fees of 10-15% per transaction, they actively want to sell a ticket for $100 (pocketing $10-15), and then see a ticket sold again on their site for $1,000 (pocketing $100-150). The more times a ticket changes hands, the more money they make — and resellers allow for the perfect villain where platforms get to say “it’s their fault” and point at the price gougers, when in reality they’re benefiting just as much.

This is an issue other nations are solving. The United Kingdom has legislation on the books that will ban all ticket sales at prices above face value, which is expected to be enacted into law later this year. Canada is taking on FIFA directly, serving notice that they’re in breach of federal law banning sales above face value for the World Cup. In Australia, reselling is either banned entirely or limited so nobody can profit more than 10% over face value before they are breaking the law. Price gouging is also banned in France, Germany is passing laws to match them, with Spain following suit.

Meanwhile in the USA, nothing is happening. In March of 2025 the White House made a promise to better enforce the BOTS bill and protect consumers from price gouging, but over a year later, there has been no movement on the issue. The expectation was that the administration was doing this to get ahead of the 2026 World Cup, but the tournament is functionally here — and price gouging has taken center stage throughout the process.

The entire situation is rotten. Tens of thousands of fans are being robbed of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, so talentless vultures with no other marketable skills can claim they’re “on their grind,” profiting off the misery of others. A generation of children are unable to experience events like the World Cup, the playoffs, or a finals game unless they’ve been born into enormous wealth. We are fast approaching a time where no kids have seen a sports event live with their parents because tickets prices are so expensive that it’s impossible to justify a family night at a game.

This is more than making $30 profit on a squishy cube sold at Walmart, it’s ripping the heart out of something we hold so dear. We need our representatives to all step up and stop the practice of live event price gouging — and it’s something so easy to enact that it could be done within days.